HAVING GOALS CREATES LESS ANXIETY
The chaos of our world and everyday life can create much anxiety, as well as emotional and mental confusion within us all. Those feelings even have a strong potential to give us bouts of clinical depression, as I’ve discovered from personal experience.
However something else which I’ve discovered from personal experience is that setting ourselves goals to work towards is very helpful for our emotional, mental and physical wellbeing.
Definitions of what goals are vary between each individual, and they may even change during different times of our life. For instance goals could be based on career issues, gaining money or material possessions, as well as being based on our emotional state and social/family situations. Setting any kind of personal goal/s is extremely important for our own inner happiness, and we don’t always have to express them openly. We can set a goal and work towards it privately. Regardless of how we choose to attain our goals, the emotional satisfaction we’ll gain by doing so will be highly rewarding.
Now I’ll give a personal story of my own. On the threshold of leaving school my life was very disorganised. For much of high school I had too much anxiety to both complete and understand my schoolwork. I was even absent from school frequently due to clinical depression and insomnia. From the ages of 13-17 depression, therapy, trials of different medications and sleepless nights were the sole theme of my life. With all of that to focus on, there was absolutely no time for me to think about lessons at school, or where I was to go in my upcoming adult life. It’s not that I wasn’t interested in those things. It was plainly and simply due to me not having enough time to think about them, as all of it was taken up by working my way out of deep depression with intense therapy. Depression is a horrible illness to have. This is why we must be very wary of where our feelings and mindset are going during moments of a lot of stress.
After leaving school my life felt like a mess because I had no idea where I wanted to go in my life or where my interests and passions were. Yet by the time I was 18 years old all the therapy I had been working on had enabled me to come out of that bout of depression which was with me for quite a while.
At that particular moment there was no way that I would be able to work, study at university or live a typical adult life. Though I didn’t want to give up trying, and I still had an urge to become the best person I could possibly be. Things were made very difficult by the fact that I needed to virtually start from scratch. But due to no longer being at school I had a lot more time to work on all that.
Thus for hours, days, weeks, months or years (depending on how much work was involved) I would set myself personal goals to achieve. Many I would keep to myself; yet they always involved me developing new cognitive skills, ways of handling my emotions and anxiety, and even on developing motivation itself. Every time I would achieve a goal (to the best of my ability) I would get a feeling of positive satisfaction within me.Something else which is great about setting personal goals is that we ourselves know the exact level of our abilities. This means that it would be impossible for us to cheat or take shortcuts in the process of attaining goals in a fulfilling way.